This application relates generally to the field of remote monitoring, and in particular relates to remote monitoring of unmanned facilities, and even more particularly relates to remote monitoring of unmanned vehicle fuel dispensing stations.
Vehicle fuel dispensing or refueling stations, typically referred to as gas stations or fuel islands, number in the hundreds of thousands. Typical stations utilize employees, sometimes having the employees dispense the gasoline into the vehicles of individual customers, and at other times having one or more employees simply oversee the facility in the event there is an issue that needs to be addressed, the customers filling their own vehicles in a “self-service” manner and paying at the pump with a credit card. With the exception of fleet refueling stations, most fire marshal regulatory codes require the presence of an on-site employee to address emergencies, such as manually shutting off gas flow to the pumps or notifying emergency responders in the event of a fire.
It would be beneficial to the owners of the fuel islands to be able to operate under the self-service model without the requirement of maintaining an employee on-site. With an unmanned fuel island, systems must be in place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to monitor multiple aspects of the fuel island to determine if there are any issues of concern. It is an object of this invention to provide a fuel island redundant monitoring system for use with an unmanned fuel island that meets and exceeds regulatory safety requirements, the monitoring occurring at a geographically spaced location from the fuel island, with the monitoring system being redundant such that both live personnel and automatic machine monitoring can occur separately and simultaneously.